My worker bee picked me up early in the morning and brought me down to the spca adoption center with the hopes of picking out a pet....
"You wont be taking one home today, today is just to look, to shop..."
As if picking a friend could be that easy, just go in and shop around for a while, get a FEEL for them.
My heart twisted in knots as I stepped through the door, animals all of them, caged and wild eyed with anxiety or docile with jaded acceptance. Every one of them desperately needing a home, some one to take them into there arms and love them and care for them.
I don't know why I put myself through this... Going into animal shelters and pet stores and even going as far as to peruse the pet section of craigslist. Kills me EVERY TIME.
Towards the back there sat a squat cage on a small platform, and inside where four young cats, all of them solid black. Most of them came up to the cage walls and peered out, but far in the back one simply rested, the runt of the little with a small paper tag like a hospital bracelet reading "Mopsy". As I approached her side of the cage she lifted her eyes to mine and what I saw melted me to the core. Mopsy was not only the runt, but one of a litter of kittens that had come under horrible abuse. She had gotten the worse of it, patches of hair had had to be shaved off around her under arms, her ears with thick with black gunk from ear-mites, and her left eye shone solid white with cataract.
"From an injury" the young female staff member said, and wouldn't tell me any more.
When I extended my fingers to the cage she rubbed the side of her face lovingly against them and looked out at me, squinting and staring with that one good eye. She had seen the wars, been through the ringer, been through hell and back, took a licken and kept on ticken. Mopsy was world weary at the tender age of two, young even for a cat. But something in the way she looked at me prompted me to ask that she be removed from her cage and brought to a small adjacent room for me to socialize with her.
As she was lifted from her cage, she did not protest, simply went limp and allowed herself to be carried, though her eyes told a different story. The good eye bloomed wide with terror and distrust of the woman who now held her and carried her along. Her claws gripped her shirt as if expecting any moment to be tossed at the nearest wall.
One in the room Mopsy was placed on the floor and saw me enter. She starred up and me with that single eye and again her lids drifted into a mellow and relaxed squint. A moment latter she rolled onto her back exposing her belly to me. I got down on my haunches and stroked the fur there. It was soft, like the inside of expensive slippers. She purred with reckless abandon and again rubbed her face along my wrist and hand, marking me with her scent. I decided right then and there that Mopsy would be my kitty, that the following day I would return for her, to take her home and into my humble home, and far more humble life...
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